From our treeyo site.
Fall Kidding season has brought joy and perspective once more. Newness, an exhilarating yet addictive trait within the modern homesteading world. Read the blog to reflect on what newness brings in the present and the future.
Baby Goats and Newness, Perspective
As the economy dries and time becomes more abundant, i have been participating much more in the age-old tradition of shepherding. This has allowed me to observe and document how goats and tree crop forages combine. As i reflect on the season of change, I write and make videos to show this splendid interaction. When you have large and mature oak and honey locust trees, you gotta get the animals to them and allow them to eat free grain and pulse sources. And you get to see the herd in a much different style of eating. From 🐐 to 🐖, 🍻.
https://treeyopermaculture.com/2025/11/18/tree-crops-connections-goats-acorns-and-honey-locust-pods/
As stated in the last blog post, we started an edible landscaping company in 2021. We have amassed the pictures into a portfolio page with descriptions. It’s been great to work in so many different parts of the tri-state and beyond but still in the Ohio River Valley.
Fruit trees are being ordered, staff is being sorted, clients being onboarded right now for this exciting year ahead!
My wintertime musings, how should i build soil today here at Treasure Lake? Here is a glimpse into it from a 24 hour period. Enjoy
As I reflect upon this last year of tree planting through the design documentation that I love to do on these days that are cold and day length is short, I remember what was and what is. My yearning to plant trees is still strong, mostly limited by resources like time and money. Nonetheless, the desire to create pockets of biodiversity here at Treasure Lake is still there, scaled to fit these resource limitations and abundance in other ways. It has become quite obvious to me the speed and scale to take to ensure the trees that get planted this year will be able to be taken care of next year as well. That compounds over time as the yearly spring and fall plantings begin to add up over a 4 year period. Moreover on the pattern level, the where and how (earthworks) to plant just pops out in my daily walks and travels around the farm. Here on my families land I mainly work the edges through the develop nuclei and let them merge over time pattern of small scale intensive. Furthermore, my time constraints often come from caring for animals, which their manures from their housing is being directed partly to tree crops and plantings through deep mulching. Areas that I want to do broad acre tree crop plantings through alley cropping are now getting animal rotations thus helping to improve the soil before we ever make that intervention.
Here on a 60 acre property, it is hard to not say that nearly all of it is actually a food forest. The amount of foraged foods harvested this year probably outweighs my cultivated gardens and trees. But the cultivated stuff is young, there was a late frost, and the semi cultivation of the forest for over 20 years now does make it an easier statement and easier harvests. Nonetheless each year we build off of existing edges and existing plantings while building out new spaces. For example the back hedgerow got a little longer and thicker and a new banks development was created thus extending that edge. So each year that we are here, we will continue to manage what is here, plant more, and envision what is next. I try and operate with the mantra of don’t start planting until most of the stuff you planted before is well taken care of. Sometimes you do it concurrently because of the weather and spaces. Furthermore, I have lost too much stuff in the past to not take care of stuff properly, especially when I do have a mountain of woodchips and now heaps of manures.
The expansion of the Growing Value Nursery here at Treasure Lake was enough for a whole years worth of writing and work. Nonetheless it is just one part of the bigger story. This year really marked a significant growth of the size and offerings of the nursery. The size here at Treasure Lake tripled, we implemented a new urban site in Pricehill in Cincinnati, and the organization of the nursery was upgraded. Each year I have been back I have taken one step further into the organization and day to day operations, especially in the very busy and demanding spring. From a design perspective, with the tripling of size, it is the four very large sugar maples that really make this all possible. Of course the water infrastructure as well as access and the building headquarters being right there is critical as well. The design drawings show this below as well as the 7000 sq foot area taken up by plants.
This is one of those examples of you set up the framework in the fall (19) and then you plant out further in the spring (20). So after sheet mulching beds and planting paw paw and strawberry at 15 ft spacing, this spring was time to add in different layers with bushes in between. As you can see below we used currants, gooseberries, bush cherry, and honeyberry mainly. Beyond that, a greywater/ rain garden system was implemented and combined well together with pipes from both going to the same earthwork. Remember from a design perspective, both are holes in the ground with mulch and plants on the simplistic pattern level. Additionally after living in a zone 0 for a bit of time, some of those classic herb/ flower beds sprout around the house as well a veg garden. Being in sandy soils and knowing that it would mainly be a summer garden, we went with the sunken bed strategy that I loved in my time in the Iberian drylands (2009- 2016).
Swale implementations are based upon seeing runoff that can be infiltrated rather than running off. We did exactly that with the winter weekend PDC of early 2020. In this area where our unique sandy soils switch to the normal heavy clays, we indeed hit pockets of each as we dug this swale. We did combine elements of both swale and terrace as we reinforced the backside of the swale mound with logs as you would a terrace. Furthermore being varying degrees of shade, we added in what we could on the low budget and plan to plant more Euro Pears in this area. Its another phase in this area just to the north of the paw paw orchard that is also being currently upgraded.
The same property line as the hedgerow that I have been developing for years now is being furthered extended east. I have big plans of filling in with more evergreens to compliment the existing large white pines, but for now taking advantage of a great little microclimate. About 10 years ago, when I was in full swing of my travels, I put in a handful of nut trees on this back edge. Only one survived that being a northern hardy pecan seedling so I planted two grafted ones on its flanks to compliment. The intended design for this area is to beef up the evergreen windbreak and fill in on the south with tree crops. This pattern will extend to the southern border of the chicken/goat yard as we need more shade in this area come summer time. To make it more hospitable, well I did what Uncle Bill told me to do; Plant Mulberries in your chicken yard. Those drawings in the Intro to Permaculture book still are burned in my head of the chicken yard.
This being my oldest planting of any real size and success (fall 2017 start), this section continues to fill in and grow well. The nuclei are ready to merge even more this year as my 6 ft diameter beds have grown to be more like 8 to 10 ft diameter as the woodchip mulch is extended outwardly and thickened each year. A lot of energy goes into this 250 ft long hedge each year so I decided to augment some things this fall. With some of the blueberries simply never performing, even after replacing a few of them, I planted other stuff right next to them. I figured why even bother pulling it out and lets take advantage of these circular growing spaces that have been mulched and fertilized for years. So five of those circles were augmented. The first was to add a Kousa dogwood right next to one that has been growing quite well since that fall 2017 inception. Next to that two cornelian cherry as they are in the same family. In front of that line, a couple of the circles got the Asian Pear Olympic variety. That felt good to make that switch and know these trees will instantly thrive because the soil has been building for years. As I did this I thought why not more Asian Pears and on my walks of checking on these new plantings over the next weeks I let two more spots for Asian Pears reveal themselves, partly from looking at the maps seen below and partly form on site observation. So we thickened the back hedgerow on the far west side with two more Asian Pears from the nursery that were looking very ready for a soil home. Kosui and Shinseiki bring our total of Asian Pears on the property up to 10 with six different cultivars. I look forward to collecting more cultivars. And with the 2021 season ahead, unless we get a late frost again like 2020, we should be starting to see some fruit production from plums and pears as the grafted trees coming into fruit age is upon us.
With a permablitz badly needed for the community and the site, we brought a good sized group of 40 or so together one mid November for some cool bee hive like motion. It actually went very smoothly as we did lots of staging work beforehand that allowed people to start finding their roles and begin implementing. So the hazelnuts and paw paws and elderberries were dropped in on the eastside through individual tree planting terraces. Also the native buttonbush shrub was added lakeside to bring back lake edge pollinator habitat in the coves of the lake. Above that terraces of apples and elderberry were added to further our banks development mission that we started last year. This year it was the apples turn to be the star of the show and this time within a valley rather than the faces of the ridges. The apples were a mix of tightly packed dwarves and semi dwarf trees flanking on the edges where there was more space. Two dolgo crabapples were added to ensure pollination and to compliment two mature redbuds already there growing. In this way we bring that botanical forest mission further, to utilize our already existing trees as framework for these sorts of plantings rather than simply clear cutting for a blank slate. I really look forward to caring for this particular planting because so many of the other plantings are slightly out of the way of the zone 1
path that extends a quarter mile from the tiny house to the big house, both zone 0’s here at Treasure Lake. So daily I get to observe this new planting numerous times a day and am super thankful for all who came and planted!
I really enjoy being able to setup these spaces and do the work of building soil rather than weeding lots. That means deep mulching and at the end of the day I kid with so many I teach that Permaculture is just moving organic matter from one place to another. And that folks is why we do design work. Start designing for spring plantings. And once more thank you for all the helping hands who contributed to tree planting, mulching, fencing, and general care for this place.
Honestly, it has been so much change and evolution that I have not even had the time to write. While a shame in some ways, it is tied to deepening roots here at Treasure Lake. It has been about executing the 2020 plan, of course altered by covid, but the intention led to action. Major highlights of the year so far include the following:
Overall it has been a lot of infrastructure builds, from more edge within the once bar and now community center to chicken coops, numerous goat houses, kidding stalls, fences and the like. What once was a wasteland of lawn and the resource area/ junk pile has now turned into goatlandia. It, like any other project, has been a massive learning curve, lots of hard work, and some very rewarding times and moments. We will start at the beginning of the year and work our way through. Of course beyond the headers there has been a constant, change and always leveraging new implementations while maintaining existing systems. Thus I will try to keep it short and sweet for each one and write/ video more on these given topics as the days shorten, temps cool, winter sets in, and time evolves.
Our year of 2020 was planned for lots of courses, tours, meetups, etc to take next steps of the Treasure Lake and Treeyo fusion of a bioregional educational center. We started off well with winter botany with Abby Artemisia and all the fun that comes from hosting Abby and co. From there we did the maple syrup making course in early February with mentor, elder, and young hearted Barry Schlime. Fun stuff there as I able to teach maple ecology and Barry taught the ins and outs of syruping. Before and after that weekend I was once again teaching at University of Cincinnati DAAP with the accelerated pdc, this time the second half. Following that the winter weekend pdc began here at Treasure Lake with the Cincinnati Permaculture Institute. Amongst these weekend courses, the whisperings of covid began globally and the writing was on the wall. Even the 4th weekend of the pdc, second to last, we wondered if we should do it or not. It was a great group, with two europeans, which made the course feel more familiar. In the end we canceled the fifth and final weekend and that began the closing of the doors for education for the year in large class gatherings. And we pivoted towards more farming adventures and ventures. I currently am teaching the university of Cincinnati pdc again, this time all online. So different and odd yet an opportunity to finish filming the PDC for online trainings. Also we are augmenting platforms for our online paw paw masterclass.
Our next offering will be a hybrid online course, prerecorded lectures and live zoom meetings for the winter weekend PDC that I teach here at Treasure Lake.
We may even open it up to those beyond the region and have a crew to tape the tours and hands on.
One of the adventures and ventures was indeed the time old tradition of making maple syrup. Slogging through the cold, wet grounds and loving the warm and sunny days. It is a great winter activity and we are very much looking forward to next season!. Honestly we cheated a bit by doing it with electric rather than firewood. Indeed, Rome wasn’t built in a day. It did involve a descent sized investment for this cash strapped farm. Boiling pan, warming pan, hydrometer, finishing pot, bottles, jugs, taps, tubing and hoses. Most of that is one time costs and we will scale up next year as the syrup was great even though I barely eat it due to diet restrictions. If you are going to eat sweets, might as well be local.
It once was a bar, but now it no longer is. This 3000 sq foot building is a huge asset, also sometimes called the big house, since we live in the tiny house but only cook breakfast there. It is a space that continues to evolve to keep pace with dynamic community development and on farm needs. With all this maple equipment invested in we had some shelves put in to hold it all. Behind a panel wall we found the old ship lap diamond pattern and built around that for a cool feature. Lighting in the building was upgraded, more shelving here and there for books and animal feed. Zone 0 is an important part of the design and here at Treasure Lake we have multiple of them.
For the last couple of years we have been working with the Cincinnati Permaculture Institute and their Growing Value nursery of edible perennials. The whole range of food forest layers are carried by the nursery and this year we really scaled up the size of it. At the very least it tripled in size/ quantity of stock and was a huge operation this spring with multiple people involved. It is really fun to see all these plants and dream of planting all the different cultivars as well. One day….. The work of potting them up is indeed enormous. Once they are potted then there is the the arranging, the tagging, the pricing, the marketing, the sales, the watering, the mulching, the weeding, the fertilizing, the pruning, and the transfers to our other retail location in Pricehill in Cincinnati. And it is so much work that its hard to find time to even seed the paw paw seeds saved from last year. But we did, we seeded with heat mat trays underneath inside until they sprouted. Then we transfered those long tube pots this time. Again another descent sized investment but now that I am in the nursery game for the longterm, well it made sense to get to another scale. After doing a few hundred last year we were able to get to more like 700 paw paw seedlings successfully alive after several months. The swallow tail caterpillar has been rough on the seedlings this year but they always bounce back.
Having established a new zone 0 last year with the tiny house at what once was campsite 1, it made sense to develop zones of growing around it. Last year was zone 2/3 plantings of hazelnuts, paw paws and terraces of fruit trees along the banks of the lake. This year it was zone 1 garden beds, slightly sunken as we have sandier soils that can dry quicker. For a first year garden we did have some nice harvest this year but a major fertility push is happening this fall/winter. Furthermore, last year we began a rim planting of the ridge that the tiny house sits on with Paw Paw and strawberries with a good sheet mulch during implementation. This year we augmented this edge further with currants, mainly white imperial, gooseberry, mainly amish red, bush cherry, more strawberry, honeyberry, and temperate passion fruit. Around 25 plants flanked these Paw Paws making for a nice little beginnings to a fedge. From there we turned the zone 3 terrace of peaches and nectarines below the tiny house more into zone 2 by adding in lots of perennial herbs such as rosemary, oregano, sage, tarragon and lavender. We had good harvests of berry fruits this year and look forward to much more next year. The hard frosts of May made it a rough year on many plants but the young fruits trees needed to grow bigger before fruiting anyway.
That was in the spring and summer and this fall we were back at banks development through a Permablitz. On our walk from the tiny house to goatlandia and the big house, another banks opportunity has been accomplished. After years of looking at this space and slowly getting the regenerating forest augmented, we made the great leap of increasing our food forest. It is caddy corner from the swale we dug with our PDC this late winter. From the banks of the lake to the edge of the road, we dug, terraced, planted, mulched, caged, and threw microbe laden vermicompost out. The turnout was great and I suppose with all the shut downs and this outdoor gathering, people took advantage with looming shutdowns once more in early November. A good group of around 40 showed up and gave back to this land as we do day in and day out. We are very thankful for this pulsation as we got in apples and crabapples, elderberry and paw paw, and hazelnuts and buttonbush. We continue to thicken the mulch through our animal bed cleanings and huge woodchip pile. In fact we have been doing it for all the trees mentioned above, weekly cleanings and weekly mulchings! While I may go a week without seeing the peach terrace down below the tiny house, well this banks development I see numerous times a day!
Beyond this area we have added in more trees like two Northern Hardy Pecans to compliment the other seedling that has grown well on the northern hedgerow we are developing. Also in the northwest hedgerow we have replaced/ planted right next to some blueberries with other tree crops that are doing well. To compliment the two Asian Pear that have done well we added a couple more Asian Pear, this time Olympic or Korean Giant, as its a cultivar we didn’t have yet. I believe that puts us at six different cultivars within the two plantings of Asian Pears. We are getting ready to plant two more in new nuclei as our six foot diameter beds are doing well to form the hedgerow. Also some blueberry replacement included another Korean Dogwood to compliment another that has done very well. We also added two Cornelian Cherry, the English edible dogwood, adjacent to the Korean ones. We keep adding where it makes sense creating pockets of tree crops/ food forests.
Well creating goatlandia and the subsequent systems of meeting their basic needs and rotational grazing has been a grand leap forward for us. The buildup was alongside the buildup for the chickens and will need more explanation with further blogs and video. So here is a synopsis of bullet points:
Yeah the story is way too long to tell but its been a wild ride full of action due to implementation and feedback loops based on observation. You make choices and then there are repercussions as we still dial the system in.
While less complex, the chickens element addition has been fun, hard, and immediate beginnings of return on investment. The hardest part for sure was the building of the coop which is within our main goat area. It was a difficult as we built off the existing shed. And actually extends into the shed. The coop, built by Tom Garoutte, features the following:
And with all that and the addition of 20 something birds of mix breeds, the eggs are rolling in. We have had a couple of birds die to different ailments, yet overall its been a great development. We also raised an additional 5 pullets from store bought hatchlings and bought another 12 mature laying hens. We have lost some to predators, to disease or injury, tough but always a learning process. Currently we sit at about 30 birds with 18 to 24 eggs coming in a day. And yes our Rhode Island Red roosters live up to their reputation of being nasty.
The amount and quality of compost produced this year has been such a blessings with new gardens and tree plantings abounding. To be able to throw out handfuls in these spaces rater than just make extract is fantastic. And I mean very high quality worm casting compost. Worm bins and compost piles really are a perennial system and they do indeed get better and better by the year. I have found that taking fall leaf collections, chipped by a mower, and putting that into a compost pile makes the best brown material addition for the worm bin the next year here. Leaf mold compost is started elsewhere and then transfered to the bins where the worms and all the other critters, micro and macro, do an amazing humus conversion. Also right now we are building more windrow composts with our huge woodchip pile and animal bedding incorporated. We started with beet kvass in a trough of the woodchip piles and slowly have built this to be about three feet high and 80 feet long. I may use more of this in my worm bins next year but look forward to seeing the results come spring. The wood chips are already fairly broken done after 18 months and the addition of the manures should make it even better. Can’t wait to scale up again next year, slowly but surely.
Health is a form of wealth. Here is 13 Health Tips for Better Immunity that I wrote 18 months ago but only now able to press publish. Its a very long road of health, its hard in fact. Do what you can eh. A lot has to do with supporting your micro biome.
The last few months have been very busy and the time to do much educational material production has been quite minimal. Many systems are being installed, upgraded, and managed at Treasure Lake. Here is an example of one of the spaces we created last year that is going through an upgrade via management. It has been so long that i can’t possibly blog my way out of this one, rather just show whats happening in the present and teach through that. It definitely shows the critical combination of soil, water, trees and earthworks!
Video link:
This is one of the areas that we planted in 2019 and covered in my 2019 Tree Planting Blog: click here.
Here is a few links from some of the topics that I mention in the video for your further learning:
Terraces
Soil Food Web
Food Forest
Happy summer y’all, straight outta Petersburg, Kentucky at Treasure Lake!
Prarie banana, paw paw, Asimina triloba, North America’s largest fruit here in an edible landscaping context. Its 13th growing season at my folks house in the burbs, swale fed. And despite this being its 3rd flowering of the year due to late frost, this soon to be cultivar of grafted trees, is once again loaded with tropical tasting fruit. Learn more in our online paw paw class!
Join the Paw Paw Master Class
Know the pattern of diversity, and the details of guilds will follow! #permaculture #foodforest